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Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to get more than $25 per day in benefits under a new law sent this week to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's desk by the state legislature. The bill also prohibits welfare recipients from spending their benefits at certain types of businesses, including liquor stores, fortune tellers, swimming pools and cruise ships. "We're trying to make sure those benefits are used the way they were intended," state Rep. Michael O'Donnell (R) said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. "This is about prosperity. This is about having a great life."

In 2013, Fox News proudly broadcast an interview with a young food stamp recipient who claimed to be using the government benefit to purchase lobster and sushi."This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing," Greenslate explained to Fox. “It’s free food; it’s awesome."That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items. Now, a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing for legislation that would stop people like Greenslate and severely limit what food stamp recipients can buy. The bill being proposed would ban the purchase with food stamps...

Anger toward those living below the poverty line seems to only be increasing. Maine and Missouri have proposed bills limiting residents’ food choices if they use SNAP. Missouri House Bill 813 would bar the state’s 930,000 food stamp recipients from using their benefits to buy cookies, chips, soda, energy drinks, steak and seafood. (The legislature also implemented mandatory drug testing for TANF applicants in 2011.) If the bill becomes law, a Missourian can’t buy a can of tuna with an EBT card. Tortilla chips to go with salsa? Nope. Flank steak — tough, stringy and the only cut of beef...

Budget legislation passed by Congress last week includes cuts to some welfare programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The cuts have already attracted backlash from left wing activist groups like the feminist group UltraViolet, which launched a campaign to petition Congress to restore the funding. “Overnight, the U.S. Senate voted for a budget that literally takes food away from hungry children,” UltraViolet’s campaign pleads. “The budgets that have now passed both the House and Senate make deep, painful cuts to the food stamps program.” TurningPoint USA responded with a little digging. Here’s what they found: After a brief...

“Primarily you are looking at taxpayers’ dollars that provide EBT cards, that are ultimately buying drugs,” said Sheriff Deryl Loar, of the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (EBT) allow individuals receiving government benefits such as food stamps to charge products to the government when they shop. The Indian River County Sheriff’s Office tells WPEC-TV that career criminal Anthony Wheeler is not the first accused drug dealer found taking payment for drugs with taxpayer-funded electronic benefit cards. …

Taxpayers fund food benefits for the poorest families among us. Tonight, CBS12 investigates why those food stamp cards are becoming a common currency for purchasing illegal drug deals. The Indian River County Sheriff's Office says career criminal Anthony Wheeler, 44, is not the first accused drug dealer detectives found taking payment for drugs with taxpayer-funded electronic benefit cards. But the Sheriff says the abuse of the benefit cards seems to be getting worse, and the cards are too easily transferable from person to person. "Primarily you are looking at taxpayers’ dollars that provide EBT cards, that are ultimately buying drugs,"...

Republican senators want to restrict products that may be purchased with Electronic Benefit Transfer cards used in state aid programs for the poor and disabled. Under Senate Bill 169, recipients would be banned from using the cards or cash drawn on the cards to purchase alcohol, tobacco, lottery tickets, firearms, or for adult entertainment, gambling, tattooing and body piercing. A similar bill passed the Senate last year, but was killed by the House which instead studied the issue. The result, House Bill 219, which restricts using the cards at locations such as smoke shops, tattoo parlors or marijuana dispensaries. State...

With a grocery bills priced as high as $1,300 per month as of late, some American workers simply cannot afford all of their groceries on top of everything else they already have to buy. This is why the government offers food stamps. The USDA Food and Nutrition Service reports that as of September 2014, there were around 46.5 million individual food stamp recipients (22.7 million households) receiving an average benefit of $123.74 each (around $257 per household).

DENVER — Public tax money very likely paid for welfare recipients to smoke the equivalent of about 17 pounds of weed (or approximately 9,000 joints) in 2014. Compared with what the rest of Colorado ingested, that’s a small percentage, but controversial none the less. ... the Colorado Department of Human Services calls the “Quest” Electronic Benefit Transfer Card under its Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Cash Assistance program. This account is not meant to be used for food, rather “a family’s most basic needs.” It’s essentially a bank debit card, loaded up with from $200 to $1,000 in cash every...

SPRINGFIELD - Police arrested a 23-year-old Springfield man who threatened to kill a Sumner Avenue convenience store clerk during a 2 a.m. dispute over $14 in merchandise and an out-of-state electronic benefits debit card, police said.

The number of beneficiaries who receive compensation from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, has topped 46,000,000 for 37 straight months, according to data released by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). In September 2014, which is the latest data from the USDA, there were 46,459,998 Americans who received assistance from the SNAP program. The number of beneficiaries has exceeded 46 million since September 2011, a total of 37 months, or more than three years. [snip]Households on food stamps in September got an average of $252.69 during the month, and the program benefits cost taxpayers $5,748,809,023....

MADISON, Wis. — Some of the boldest reforms to public assistance in the nation may arise from the Wisconsin Legislature in coming months. Armed with the largest Assembly majority in 57 years and comfortable control of the state Senate, Republican leadership appears to be putting together the kind of ambitious reform agenda that could rival 2011, when the Republican-led majority introduced and passed a spate of conservative — and controversial — initiatives. On Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, announced the creation of the Public Benefit Reform Committee. While the new committee’s chair or its members have yet to be...

Facebook post: Selling my leftover food stamps for this month, black Friday just killed my bank account. Interested? Message me." (Reply: "Just saying...you do know that this is a pretty public page and you can get stripped of your benefits if the state gets wind of this?") Rep. Shauna O'Connell is on the Howie Carr show now; probably not much can be done to the woman who posed the question.

Two men affiliated with the New Black Panther Party allegedly planned to murder Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and bomb the Gateway Arch. In an undercover police sting, the two bought a pipe bomb, and intended to buy two more but couldn’t afford it until one man’s girlfriend’s Electronic Benefit Transfer card was refilled, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Brandon Orlando Baldwin and Olajuwon Ali Davis, who go by the names Brandon Muhammad and Ali, were indicted last week on weapons charges when Baldwin purchased two hi-point .45-caliber pistols intended for someone...

ST. LOUIS • Two men indicted last week on federal weapons charges allegedly had plans to bomb the Gateway Arch — and to kill St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson — the Post-Dispatch has learned. Sources close to the investigation were uncertain whether the men had the capability to carry out the plans, although the two allegedly did buy what they thought was a pipe bomb in an undercover law enforcement sting.

Under President Obama’s new program to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, many of those affected will be eligible to receive Social Security, Medicare and a wide array of other federal benefits, a White House official said Tuesday. In his speech Thursday night, the president touted his plan as a means of bringing accountability to a broken immigration system, under which 11 million or more people are estimated to be living in this country illegally. “We’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens...

Gov. Paul LePage’s administration is facing a potential loss of federal funding to administer its food stamp program over concerns about state’s decision to put photos on cards used to access the benefits. Federal officials said in a letter to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday that recipients are being given information that makes it seem like they’re required to have their photos placed electronic benefit transfer cards, even though the program is voluntary. The Republican governor’s administration must make it clear to recipients that their decision to not have their photo placed on the card...

The federal committee charged with creating nutrition guidelines for Americans is calling for fat interventions at workplaces.During a presentation at the sixth meeting of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) on Friday, the committee said government needs to take “bold action” to fight obesity.The solutions included “comprehensive” obesity interventions in “health care, the community, public health facilities, and work sites.”“The public should monitor body weight and engage with providers in evidence-based approaches aimed at achieving and maintaining healthy body weight,” the panel said in a presentation on “Food and Nutrient Intakes, and Health.”The committee, which is responsible for creating...

Not that the timing makes it any more egregious, but six days after being named the 17th richest member of Congress, it’s being reported that U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson‘s estranged wife has been issued an EBT card to help feed his children. Lolita Grayson was approved for public assistance by the state of Florida, and their four minor children — they have five children altogether — are also enrolled in the free lunch program in Orange County schools, according to ABC affiliate WFTV. The stay-at-home mom was asked if she ever thought she’d be on food stamps. “No,” Lolita responded....

Barely a week after being named the 17th richest member of Congress, liberal firebrand and Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson is refusing to support his estranged wife and their kids, and his wife has turned to government food stamps to support her family, WFTV 9 Orlando reports. Grayson’s marriage of 29 years dissolved earlier this year when his wife, Lolita Grayson, filed for divorce. A week later, Rep. Grayson asked a court to annul the marriage on the basis of bigamy.Mr. Grayson is refusing to support his family because he is claiming that she was never divorced from her first husband...